UniCare: Creating Superior Customer Experience to Help Operators Achieve Unique Value

Emerging Reforms in the Telecom Industry

Growth in global telecoms is expected to drop below 3% in the coming three years. However, there are some particular areas where growth might reach 10% to 30%. These high-growth areas are broadband, cloud services, government-enterprise networks, IPTV, and PBX. OTT business accounts for less than 4% of total telecom revenue, but is strategically significant in the industry.

The telecom industry is undergoing a profound transformation, and operators are faced with various challenges. First, although competition among operators has driven down tariffs, operations are not efficient enough. Telecom operators are therefore seeking to outsource their non-critical services. Second, there are challenges in terms of rapidly evolving technology. While guaranteeing a healthy, stable network, a telecom operator must also keep up with these changes, which include the deployment of LTE and small cells and the rapid growth of the 100G Ethernet. As a result, telecom professional services have been urgently sought out. Third, operators are finding it hard to remain dominant in the mobile internet market, where their profits are falling. On the one hand, OTT companies and content providers are launching services that are constantly changing consumer attitudes and consumption habits. This is significantly impacting the basic businesses of traditional operators. On the other hand, OTT companies and terminal manufacturers are gradually taking control of internet portals, including terminals, browsers, and online application stores, which are all important in attracting  users away from the services of traditional operators. According to a survey, improving user experience is the top priority of 68% of operators because they realize that user experience is now critical to retaining and attracting users. Guaranteed user experience is the basis of squeezing more value from communication pipes.

UniCare: Responding to Industry Changes and Transformation

ZTE UniCare is a service that helps operators deal with developments and trends in telecommunications. UniCare is universal; that is, it provides holistic, whole-process solutions that are differentiated, customized, and not duplicable. UniCare provides packaged, customer-oriented technical solutions, tools, and platforms. It is a package of solutions that are adaptable to an operator’s needs at different stages in their network development. UniCare addresses two main concerns of telecom operators: operational guarantee and consultation. Operational guarantee means protecting network quality, service quality, and user experience in order to reduce operating costs and retain users. Operational consultation means providing consultation services for new services and platforms.

Unlike other ISP solutions, UniCare provides operational guarantee as well as consultation, and its one-stop concept sets a trend of intensive services. With extensive experience in guaranteeing service quality and user experience, ZTE has developed UniCare, which is a holistic system for evaluating the quality of mainstream internet services. The system features ZTE’s unique patented technologies and supporting platform and protects an operator’s investment. 

Guaranteed Network Efficiency

Fierce competition has urged telecom operators to provide quality networks and cut operating costs, and operators are increasingly turning to service providers for total solutions. A service solution should encompass all network devices, including third-party devices. ZTE’s UniCare network performance management (NPM) solution is rooted at the network device layer so that it can solve problems with network stability and security and ensure high network performance. UniCare extends traditional network optimization services. It includes integrated third-party network optimization capabilities, and various maintenance scenarios such as major event guarantee, maintenance improvement, and new tools and functions. It also includes professional support staff. UniCare NPM provides operators with layer-based, end-to-end solutions to ensure high network quality and low OAM costs.

Optimized User Experience

Operators need a service for monitoring, evaluating, and improving service quality and user experience. By doing this, an operator can solve the problem of declining user loyalty and meet user demand for better experience. UniCare service quality management (UniCare-SQM) and UniCare customer experience assurance (UniCare-CEA) solutions are now available. UniCare-SQM evaluates the quality of popular internet service, such as QQ and WeChat. It displays the quality level, and it locates and solves quality problems. UniCare-CEA uses ZTE’s self-developed user experience evaluation system, optimization methods, and CEMC support platform to provide VIP experience monitoring and guarantee. It also provides VAP user mining and care and helps an operator build visible, manageable brand that provides good user experience and increases competitiveness.

Helping Operators Transform

Growing data services require higher network quality and bandwidth, and this requires more investment in network construction and maintenance. Unfortunately, operators are not generating more revenue in the post-PC era. UniCare operation consulting (UniCare-OC) helps an operator streamline internal processes and analyze organizational architecture in order to transform from network-oriented operation to user experience-oriented operation. By devising a competitive tariff strategy and analyzing service packages, operators can identify market and service hotspots and uncover new revenue sources.

Future of UniCare

UniCare has served more than 200 operators around the world. Within a few months of release, UniCare-CEA was adopted by CSL in Hong Kong, TATA and Reliance in India, Telenor in Europe, Hutchison in Austria, and MTN in Nigeria.